Like anything in life, it takes practice to be great at something and this includes being a strong speaker.

So how does one become a strong speaker? Below are three tips you can apply to help you become more confident and strong when presenting or speaking in public:

1. Avoid using phrases that convey to the audience that the information you are telling them is coming from you. You do this when you use “just” phrases, for example, “I just thought”, “I just want to say”, etc.

2. Avoid looking surprised. A strong speaker knows his speech inside-out. There should be no surprises. So avoid saying words like “actually…”

3. Avoid diminishing the value of what you are saying. Don’t use phrases like “It just occurred to me…”, “I’m not sure but…” and the likes.

Things won’t always go smoothly as planned when we do our presentations or speak in public. Despite the fact that we’ve practiced enough, sometimes, fear get the better of us and we bomb on stage. What do we do to recover? Here are some tips:

1. Take stock and pivot.Try to see what’s wrong. Do your audience seem bored? If you’re doing a sales presentation and you already got the buy-in of the client, quickly head to the close.

2. Breathe. Stay calm. Smile. And NEVER PANIC.

3. Summarize. To buy time, summarize what you’ve already said.

4. Use a pattern interrupt. Do something unexpected to bide time such that your audience won’t even notice you’ve lost your train of thought.

Did you ever experience having been asked to present something at a moment’s notice? How did you feel? Did you panic? Were you still able to come up with a good presentation?

One thing that you can do in order to be ready when a situation like this pops up is to have a global structure for your presentation, a general framework or outline that can work for all kind of presentation. Here’s an example:

When conducting webinars, keep in mind that you have to follow similar principles as when you are giving presentations or talks in person. Below are three things that you should avoid in order to consider your webinar a success.

1. Forget to have a structure – Make sure you grab your audience’s attention as you would when you’re doing this live in front of people. You can do this by sharing an outstanding fact, giving an unusual statistic, anything that can grab and hold their attention.

2. Do bad things with Powerpoint– Just because your audience can’t see you, you’d then resort to using a ton of PowerPoint slides. Remember, quality is better than quantity.

3. Forget to use your voice– This is the only thing left that you have control over when doing webinars. They can’t see you, they can’t touch you but they can hear your voice so use it well to pique their interest and hold their attention.